Redundant arrays of inexpensive or independent storage devices (RAID) are being employed by the mass storage industry to provide variable capacity storage. RAID systems use interconnected disk drives to achieve the desired capacity of mass storage. With this approach, a disk drive of one capacity may be manufactured and packaged with the same or different capacity drives to provide the required storage capacity. RAID systems eliminate the need to manufacture disk drives individually designed to meet specific storage requirements. Each disk drive in a RAID system is usually housed in an individual module for handling and installation. The modules slide into and out of an enclosure that houses the array of disk drives and provides the sockets, plug-ins and other connections for the electrical interconnection of the drives. Controllers orchestrate the interconnection and control access to selected disk drives for data reading and writing operations.
Disk drives are high precision electro-mechanical devices in which the read/write heads fly on an air bearing at the surface of the disks. The flight height of the head is only a few microns from the disk surface. This and other sensitive aspects of the disk drives make them vulnerable to data storage defects, operational disturbances and physical damage in all but the most gentle environments. It has been observed that even the slight clearances between modules and the enclosure housing into which they slide can be the source of operational disturbances and, perhaps, damage. These clearances allow the modules to "crash" into the enclosure's rigid support structures when the enclosure is exposed to non-operational shock and vibration. The shock mounting systems typically used for mounting the disk drives in the modules are not always effective to protect the disk drives from the high frequency inputs associated with the module crashing against the enclosure.